The first and the last implementations force the most specific types
and thus should be prefered.

Overloaded string literals are no longer supported,
since this extension is intended for alternative text storage types.
It would also decrease the type safety
if you could omit the path type and let the compiler guess its type.

Modules

System.Path.Generic provides all functions with the OS as type parameter.
System.Path.Posix and System.Path.Windows
offers only path constructors and destructors
fixed to the corresponding operating system.
System.Path exports either System.Path.Posix or System.Path.Windows
depending on the host system
and additionally the manipulation functions from System.Path.Generic.
This mix should be appropriate for the average use
and should free the user from writing type annotations.

How to choose proper type arguments

The ar and the fd type parameters have quite different meaning.
The types Abs and Rel refer to a property of the path,
whereas the type File and Dir refers to a property of a disk object.
You can decide whether a path is absolute or relative
by just watching (the beginning of) the path string.
In contrast to that, you have to access the disk
in order to check the existence and type of an disk object.
Even more, the disk object might change at any time,
e.g. the user might delete a file and create a directory of the same name,
or the disk object might not exist,
and the purpose of the path is to create an according file or directory.
That’s why even if you have a path of type FilePath ar,
every function accessing the file must check
that the refered object exists and is a file.
Conversely, there is not much sense in checking the disk object type
and then chosing the path accordingly.
Instead, you must choose the path type according
to what type of disk object your application needs.
The reality check must be performed
and is performed by the standard functions
for every access to the object.
If an disk object is not of the type required by the path type
then this is a runtime exception that must be handled at runtime
but it is not a programming error.

Sometimes you have to change the type of a path
as an intermediate step to construct a path for an object of different type.
E.g. you may convert the path “pkg” from DirPath to FilePath
because in the next step you like to extend it to “pkg.tar.gz”.
This is valid use of the Path type.
E.g. the function dropExtensions
reduces the FilePath “pkg.tar.gz” to the new FilePath “pkg”
although no-one expects that there is or will be a file with name “pkg”.
Thus, if a function has a FilePath parameter
then there is no warranty that it accesses the according file
and does not touch related disk objects.
It may well be that the function derives other file and directory names
from the path and accesses them.
That is, a FilePath or DirPath parameter
is mainly for documentation purposes
but it cannot prevent you seriously from any damage.

How to cope with user input

You may get a path from the user, e.g. as command-line argument.
It might be either absolute or relative
and it might refer to an actual file or directory or
to something yet non-existing.
In most cases it will not be important
whether the path is absolute or relative,
thus you should choose the AbsRel type parameter.
If somewhere in the program an Abs path is needed
then you can assert that the path is actually absolutized somewhere
e.g. by dynamicMakeAbsolute.
If you prevent usage of genericMakeAbsolute
then you avoid to absolutize a path that is already absolutized.

The choice of the fd type parameter follows a different reasoning:
Often you have a clear idea of
whether the user must pass a file or directory path.
The rule is: Just give the path the type you expect
but do not perform any checking
(unless you want to warn the user earlier about imminent danger).
The disk object type must checked for every access to the object, anyway,
so there is no point in checking it immediately.
With your choice of the fd parameter
you just document its intended use.

It might be that the path is only a base name
used to construct other directory and file names.
E.g. for an Audacity project named music
you have to create the directory music_data and the file music.aup.
In this case we recommend to give music the type FilePath.
This type warrants that there is at least one final path component
in contrast to a directory path that might be empty.
You can easily convert a file path to a directory path
using Path.dirFromFile.
The reverse conversion is partial.

AbsRel vs. ar type parameter

In your application you will often know
whether your path denotes a file or directory,
thus you will use the Path.File or Path.Dir type synonym.
In contrast to that, you will often not know
whether the path is relative or absolute
and often it does not even matter.
You can express this either by using the monomorphic type Path.AbsRelFile
or by using the parameterized type Path.File ar
with constraint PathClass.AbsRel ar.
We recommend to use the first variant for command-line option parsing
and the second one for the application functions.
When you parse options it is the time where you know that you do not know
whether the path is absolute or relative.
That is, you could neither parse it as Path.Abs nor as Path.Rel.
Thus a type variable makes no sense.
You should always parse to type Path.AbsRel.
Conversely, your application would work equally well with
Path.Abs, Path.Rel and Path.AbsRel.
Thus, using an ar type variable is the way to go.
You must make sure to use different ar-like variables for independent paths.
By equality of ar-like type variables
you can also document dependencies of paths for the programmers.

Command-line argument parsing with optparse-applicative

For parsing of path options with the optparse-applicative package
you might use the following helper functions:

It performs minimal checking of path strings as part of option parsing.
E.g. it will report a user error if the user passes “abc/” as a file path.

File system links

This package does not explicitly handle file system links.
We treat a file path containing links like any other file path.
The same holds for directory paths.
A link is handled like any other path component.

Drive-relative paths on MS Windows

We use the Rel type for paths that can be relative to any directory.
We use the Abs type for all other paths,
i.e. for paths with explicit locations or
with restrictions on the set of locations.
Windows has a notion of drives and
maintains a current directory for every drive.
E.g. the path "c:text.txt" refers to the current directory of drive C.
Since it cannot be freely combined with other directories
we treat this path like an absolute path.
This is consistent with the behaviour of the filepath package.
E.g. filepath evaluates all of the expressions
"\\abs" </> "c:driverel", "c:\\abs" </> "c:driverel",
"d:\\abs" </> "c:driverel" to "c:driverel".
In our package you would have to use genericMakeAbsolute
but we recommend to avoid its use.

Path format strings

You might allow a user to pass a format string such as
"page%06d.png" to your program.
How to integrate this into the type-safe path handling?
We recommend not to use the Path for the format string
but instead to define a custom type:

This makes sure that you will access a path on disk
only after formatting the path string.

Known problems

Mac

Currently we select the Posix module on Mac systems.
On the one hand this choice is right
since Mac uses slashes for path component separation.
On the other hand it is wrong
since Mac ignores case when comparing filepaths.

Changes

0.8:

* relPath, absPath, filePath, dirPath deprecated in favor of Path.rel, Path.abs, Path.absRel, Path.file, Path.dir Same for the according type synonyms.

* Declare infix precedences of </>, <.> and <++> such that we can write: dir0 </> dir1 </> dir2 </> base <++> "-foo" <++> "-bar" <.> "tar" <.> "gz" This is similar to the fixities in the 'filepath' package, but differs slightly since in our package paths and extensions have different types.

* Import packages 'transformers' and 'utility-ht' that allow for some simplifications.

* replace IsString instance for OverloadedStrings by an instance that cannot be implemented.

* getDirectoryContents is no longer synonym to relDirectoryContents. Instead it returns the list of all directory objects as RelFileOrDir. This is closer to the getDirectoryContents function from the 'directory' package.

* clarify meaning of AbsRel and FileDir tags of a path

* clarify meaning of drive-relative paths on Windows

* clarify handling of file system links

0.6:

* joinPath: restrict to RelPath and atomic path components

* Add type class constraints and restrict types in order to make the functions work with the new datatype. E.g. we need to fix the type to FilePath wherever a function requires a non-empty path.

* Add support for MS Windows paths with leading drive labels

0.5.5:

* AbsRelClass, FileDirClass: turn into closed-world classes. Strict accordance to PVP would require to bump version to 0.6, but since the user cannot write instances of this class, we can hardly break code.

* IO.withFile restricted to FilePath This changes API but it should only break buggy code.

0.5.4.3:

* Make test suite static part of the source code, but maintain a program to update the test suite to changed tests.

0.5.4.1:

* Merge git back to darcs, continue on hub.darcs.net

0.5.4:

* Migrated from darcs to git (on GitHub)

0.5.3:

* Upgrades + changes for GHC 7.6.1 - by Ben Millwood

0.5.0:

* Added System.Path.Windows and System.Path.Posix modules. These are modelled on the System.FilePath approach to supporting the two styles of path.

0.0.2:

* Split System.Path.Directory into its own module* Implemented covers for all the remaining System.Directory functions* Renamed 'hasExtension' to 'hasAnExtension', and added new 'hasExtension' fn which checks for a given extension* Renamed the '...FileOrDir...' functions to be 'generic...' (thanks to Neil Mitchell for the suggestion!)* Added support for OverloadedStrings* Renamed the 'mk...' unchecked construction functions to 'as...' to better reflect what they do* Added: makeAbsolute, makeAbsoluteFromCwd, genericMakeAbsolute, genericMakeAbsoluteFromCwd* Added: mkAbsPath, mkAbsPathFromCwd* Added System.Path.IO to cover System.IO* Made the internal 'Path' type strict* Removed 'splitDirectories' as it serves no purpose not covered by 'splitPath'* Changed behaviour of 'getDirectoryContents' to return relative paths* Fixed the type of 'setCurrentDirectory'